Coca-Cola Addiction May Have Killed New Zealand Woman

When you were a kid, your mom probably told you if you kept drinking Coke, your teeth would fall out.

Natasha Harris kept drinking Coke and something a lot worse happened. The 30-year old died.
Harris, a stay-at-home mother of eight, actually passed away two years ago. But in New Zealand, where she was from, unexplained and unusual deaths are sometimes subject to an inquiry, and her’s took place recently.

During the hearing pathologist Dan Mornin stated her death was probably caused from hypokalemi — or low potassium — which he believes was due to her excessive consumption of Coke.

And how much Coke did Harris drink? According to her partner Chris Hodgkinson, who also testified, she gulped down eight to ten liters a day.

“The first thing she would do in the morning was to have a drink of Coke beside her bed and the last thing she would do at night was have a drink of Coke,” Hodgkinson said in a deposition. “She was addicted to Coke.”

A spokeswoman for the soft drink giant didn’t deny their product may have contributed to Harris’s death. Instead, she said in a statement that ‘excessive ingestion of any food product, including water, over a short period of time with the inadequate consumption of essential nutrients, and the failure to seek appropriate medical intervention when needed, can be dramatically symptomatic.”

Harris essentially lived off Coke: she ate very little, according to friends, and seems mostly to have lived off Coke and a pack and a half of cigarettes daily. So we guess the moral of the story is to eat something.